XSEDE News

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 21, 2011 — HPCwire, a leading electronic-news outlet for high-performance computing and communication (HPC), awarded a 2011 Reader's Choice Award to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for Best Use of HPC in an Edge HPC application.

The award recognizes PSC for its work with Blacklight, PSC's SGI® Altix® UV1000 system, the world's largest shared-memory system, a resource of XSEDE, the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure program. Because of Blacklight's large amount of shared memory, scientists have been able to access up to 16 terabytes at a time, a feature that has enabled ground-breaking work in several fields, including fields of computer science — natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) — that haven't traditionally made substantial use of HPC.

HPCwire presented the awards on Tuesday, November 15 in Seattle at Supercomputing 2011, the international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.

"HPCwire readers are regarded as amongst the most discerning in the HPC community, and these awards represent which HPC-related companies are making the biggest impact each year within this populace," said Tom Tabor, publisher of HPCwire. "The HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards send a succinct message to the recipients that their peers globally across the HPC community recognize their work, and consider their efforts exemplary. Our congratulations go out to all the winners."

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry, and is a partner in the National Science Foundation XSEDE program.